We love a good soup, especially one that is hearty enough to be a meal all on its own. Bonus points for also being healthy and vegetarian. This soup (adapted from a recipe by Chef Michael Chiarello) not only fits these criteria, but also is delicious and easy to make with simple ingredients you most likely already have on hand: a can of whole tomatoes, olive oil, butter, celery, a carrot, onion, garlic, chicken broth, a bay leaf, orzo pasta and spinach. It’s a great dish for anyone avoiding meat on Fridays during Lent, or anyone who likes soup and is looking for a nutritious, meat-less, meal-in-a-bowl dinner.
Category: Recipes
Turkey Chipotle Chili
There are probably as many different chili recipes as there are reasons for people’s differing opinions as to whether or not chili should have beans in it. For the record, we do not put beans in our traditional (award-winning!) chili because Texas Chili does not have beans in it. Apparently someone even wrote a song about it: “If You Know Beans About Chili, You Know That Chili Has No Beans.” We make an exception to this rule for white chili, which is a lighter alternative to the red meat version. We’ve made white chili before and enjoyed it, but felt that it lacked the flavor “wow factor” of our beef chili recipe. Enter the chipotle and the tomatillo. The idea of adding these ingredients came from this recipe and took the white chili to a whole new level, flavor-wise. The spicy/smoky chipotle and sweet/tart tomatillo give a much needed boost to the otherwise potentially bland flavor combination of white beans and ground turkey. This is a dish that even a Texas-chili-purist can love, beans and all.
Baked Panko Fish Sticks
Anybody else remember eating fish sticks as a kid? The pre-breaded kind that you buy frozen and re-heat on a cookie sheet in the oven? I feel a strange fondness thinking back about those perfectly formed, mostly tasteless, little breaded logs of mystery fish meat — most likely because they remind me of Friday nights during Lent, which makes me happy for two reasons: Fridays signal the Weekend (favorite time of the week) and Lent signals Spring (favorite season.) Fondness aside, the fish sticks of our childhood didn’t have much going for them in the flavor department. And I’m pretty sure that their exact uniform shapes were not the result of a chef’s precise knife skills preparing the fish for breading, freezing, packaging and shipment. Makes me think of this great commercial, featuring a little girl’s indignation at being fed “minced” fish sticks: “What is this, ‘minced?’ You feed me ‘minced?’ You ever catch a minced fish?!?” We’re pretty sure that Martha Stewart never fed anyone minced fish, so we decided to try her recipe for fish sticks made from tilapia fillets as a modern version of this childhood classic. With just a few ingredients — tilapia, an egg, panko, olive oil and Old Bay seasoning — and an elegant dipping sauce made with mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, horseradish, lemon juice and parsley, the fish stick is all grown up.
Wilted Kale and Roasted-Potato Winter Salad
Despite the fact that Spring seems to have sprung (at least around these parts — temps in the high 70s here this week!), it’s not too late to try this hearty and healthy winter salad recipe, found on the Epicurious website. This is our second attempt at cooking with kale, and we think it turned out just as good as our first. We’re fans of roasted potatoes already and liked the idea of incorporating one of the healthiest vegetables on the planet for a “super food” side dish. Kale is rich in vitamins K, C and A and contains tons of health-boosting nutrients that do things like help with diet and digestion, provide antioxidants and anti-inflammatory properties, prevent cancer and lower cholesterol. Seriously, what doesn’t this leafy green do? If you’ve never tried kale, this potato salad is a good introduction to it. The salty, Parmesan-crusted potatoes complement the slightly bitter kale, and the lemon-tahini dressing brings it all together with rich, bright flavor. Surprisingly good!
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Shredded Chicken Tacos
If you like chicken tacos even just a little bit, we’re going to have to insist that you make these tacos, adapted from this recipe. While we always respect people’s varying palates and food preferences, we can’t say enough good things about these tacos and really want everyone to try them. If we could invite you all over for dinner and make them for you, we would. They’re that good. They’re also pretty easy to make — just simmer a couple of chicken breasts in a sauce made with tomato sauce, white vinegar, garlic, a chipotle pepper, ancho chile powder, ground cumin, oregano and sugar. Then shred the chicken, add it back to the sauce, and fill a couple of tortillas with the tender, spicy and tangy chicken mixture. Garnish with chopped white onion, cilantro, and a squeeze of lime, and enjoy your new favorite tacos!
Quinoa, Avocado & Edamame Salad
Regular readers may recall this post back in May, when we wrote about a side dish involving a “new-to-us” ingredient: quinoa. We liked the dish and the flavor of the quinoa, although the texture of this tiny grain is somewhat unusual and takes a bit of getting used to. So, eight months later, we decided to make it again and maybe try to get used to it. For me, understanding the health benefits of quinoa helped outweigh my issue with the texture. Quinoa is a complete source of protein, since it provides the full spectrum of nine essential amino acids. Quinoa is also high in magnesium (for cardiovascular health), copper and manganese (for a healthy immune system) and fiber (for digestive health.) Who cares if it seems like you’re picking little seed remnants out of your teeth for days after eating it — think of it as saving some of the healthy for later! I’m kidding of course — the texture isn’t that bad. And quinoa’s health benefits are no joke, so it’s worthwhile to find a way you like to eat it. I found Chef Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipe in InStyle magazine (Feb. 2012 issue) and figured it would be a good vehicle for giving quinoa another shot. In addition to the quinoa, the ingredients are all things we already like: edamame (could also use fava beans), lemon, avocado, garlic, radishes, basil, cumin, red pepper flakes and olive oil. Combining lots of different textures enhanced the overall consistency of the finished dish. Quinoa will likely never be my favorite side, but we enjoyed this salad and will make it again (sooner than eight months from now.)
Pork Chops with Italian Relish
With its warm and rich flavors of tomato, basil, oregano and garlic, Italian “relish” has a way of transforming a protein into comfort food — sort of like Sunday Sauce without the pasta (and carbs.) We’ve had Italian relish on fish and steak, but never really thought about putting it on pork, until we found this recipe on the Epicurious website. Adding the relish is an easy way to liven up weeknight pork chops with just a few simple ingredients: tomatoes, onion, red wine vinegar, olive oil, garlic, basil and oregano. We also added olives to ours, since we’ve never met an olive we didn’t like. Buon Appetito!
Celery Slaw
For the Super Bowl this year, we served one of our bar-food-at-home favorites, grilled wings. We did the buffalo version and tried a new Asian-style as well (which I ended up loving even more than the buffalo-style. Updated post coming soon.) Because the wings were our dinner that night, I wanted to serve a healthy side dish, preferably one involving vegetables. The two possibilities that immediately came to mind were celery salad and cole slaw. Our much-loved celery salad recipe seemed a bit too fancy for wings and football, and we thought this flavorful hot & sour slaw would compete with the flavor of the wings a bit too much. Instead, we combined elements of each into a lighter, sweet-yet-tangy coleslaw with tons of celery flavor. Win, win.
Butternut Squash Chowder
In our attempt to cook with seasonal foods more often, we recently made a hearty winter salad featuring butternut squash and apples. As a side dish for just the two of us, the recipe didn’t require much squash, so we had quite a bit left over — more than enough for a soup or stew. Since our prior experience cooking with butternut squash is primarily limited to roasting it as a decadent side dish for Thanksgiving dinner, we wanted a relatively easy and fool-proof new recipe for cooking it in soup. For me, cooking doesn’t get much easier than throwing a bunch of ingredients in a pot that you plug into an electrical outlet, then setting a timer and forgetting about it until the satisfying aromas wafting from the pot alert you that dinner is almost ready. (Sort of like when Bill Murray’s character in the movie “What About Bob” learns how to “sail” while strapped to the sailboat’s mast — this method of food preparation allows me to say: “I’m cooking! I cook! Well, actually, the slow-cooker does all the work.”) We have had success with recipes from what has become our slow-cooker bible of sorts, America’s Test Kitchen’s “Slow Cooker Revolution” (most noteworthy so far, Chicken & Dirty Rice), and we found their chowder recipe to be deliciously successful as well. Although it requires a bit of prep work on the front end and some assembly work at the finish, the recipe is easy and incorporates relatively healthy ingredients: 2 slices of bacon, 1/2 an onion, 2 garlic cloves, 3/4 teaspoon fresh thyme, a dash of nutmeg, 2.5 tablespoons all-purpose flour, 2 cups chicken broth, 1.5 cups vegetable broth, 1.5 pounds butternut squash, 1 bay leaf, 1/2 tablespoon vegetable oil, 4 ounces kale, 1/4 cup heavy cream, 1/2 tablespoon fresh sage, 1/2 teaspoon brown sugar, salt & pepper and Parmesan cheese and roasted pumpkin or sunflower seeds for garnish. The resulting chowder was creamy, but not too rich, with sweet roasted squash flavor complemented by a hint of bitterness from the kale.
Shrimp Salad Rolls (w/ leftover shrimp)
We cook with shrimp a lot, in many different ways — from pasta dishes to salads to gumbo. We also like to take leftover cooked shrimp (or store-bought cooked shrimp) and transform it into a new dish, like we did with these quesadillas. As often as we cook with shrimp, it can sometimes be a struggle to come up with new and different shrimp recipes. Recently when I was planning our weekly menu and trying to come up with a meal using leftover shrimp, something made me think of a wonderful week we spent on Cape Cod with Dan’s side of the family several summers ago. I remembered how Dan made it his mission that week to eat lobster every single day (he more than accomplished that goal, occasionally even eating lobster twice per day), and how much he loves lobster rolls. That’s when I had a light bulb moment — how about a roll/sandwich filled with shrimp salad instead of lobster? I researched several lobster roll recipes online and adapted this recipe to make it more compatible with the shrimp flavor. The result was a light and creamy shrimp salad in a buttery sandwich that evoked fond memories of sunny, salty, fun times at the beach with family. It’s a special thing when simple ingredients (shrimp, cucumber, celery, shallots, tarragon, lemon juice, mayo, cayenne pepper and Old Bay seasoning) combine to form a good meal that is also a reminder of good times.